The Rights of Woman Women and Femininity Quotes

The speaker says that women have been trampled on long enough, thank you very much. It's time for the ladies to assert themselves. But check out the language she's using here. The poem starts with an affirmation: "YES!" So the speaker seems to be agreeing with something that came before—it's like she's assuming that her readers and listeners are already going to be on her side. Did it work with you?

Women are "born to rule" in spite of the bias and prejudice against them. In fact, they have a natural, "native" place to rule—over emotions, or over "the breast," or heart. The speaker is claiming that women have a natural right to rule… at least over all of the feels. It's not something she's just making up, guys. This is something you can't fight. It's natural.

Women, unlike men, don't need a lot of noisy, messy weapons to get what they want. According to the speaker, women use a soft tone of voice, blushes, and shy fears to make their points. Hmm. So even though women in this poem are born to rule and are finally standing up for themselves, they still have some of the traditional, 18th-century feminine ideals, like modesty, shyness, and softness.

This is kind of a bummer. Women can't be friends with men, the speaker says. It's like that famous line from When Harry Met Sally. Only instead of "the sex thing" always getting in the way (as Harry puts it in the movie), the speaker says that men and women can't be friends because if a woman lets her guard down at all, she'll lose control. So when the speaker says that women "can never be free," there's a double meaning: first, it means that a woman can't be too free, or too careless with how she interacts with men. But it also suggests that by putting herself in charge, a woman basically imprisons herself there. She can never let her guard down, and so she can never do anything but command. The speaker's highlighting the boredom and loneliness that comes with being at the top of the heat.

At the end of the poem, the speaker backs off—she says that women won't be satisfied with "conquest," because, as the speaker just pointed out, it gets boring and lonely at the top. But women can learn a thing or two from Nature with a capital N. If men and women love each other equally, they don't really need to worry about separate rights. By asking women to learn from Nature, the speaker suggests that this is the natural state of things. This is something we can't argue with, she says. It's just the way things are.